The Belgian railway operator, SNCB-NMBS, launched an AI chatbot which the company says can answer 99% of all questions correctly.
The chatbot provides information about, among other things, possible train routes for domestic travel, train tickets and delays. For international SNCB travel, the chatbot still has to refer customers to other services.
The new AI chatbot, Mobi 2.0, is an updated version of the chatbot Mobi launched in 2020, which handled around 30,000 conversations with passengers a month.
The first version of Mobi only answered 65% of all questions correctly, according to SNCB. The spelling mistakes, longer sentences and complex formulations that overwhelmed the previous version are correctly recognised by Mobi 2.0.
According to the railway operator, the expansion of the chatbot should relieve the pressure on customer service and ensure faster responses to urgent questions from travellers.
"When a question is too complex or requires a personal approach, Mobi 2.0 automatically switches to an SNCB employee," the company explained in a statement.
The chatbot operates within a completely closed NMBS environment containing train-related information.
